Your Name Belongs To Google

It has been almost two years to the day since I left Alchemist Media to focus on ItsTheROI, yet Google still ranks the Alchemist homepage #2 for my name, “Jonah Stein”. This is despite the fact that my name ONLY appears deep inside their site in a couple of comments on blog posts I wrote three years ago. It is also despite a lot of other post about Jonah Stein like SEO Book, a dozen or so speaking engagements with my bio on authoritative sites, Twitter and Facebook profiles and lots of other mentions in the press and the blogosphere.

As with any page that is only ranking based on back links, a quick glance at the cache confirms that the words are not on the page.

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: jonah stein

The challenging part of this type of mini bombing is how difficult is it to undo once you have generated any buzz at a company. I have contacted everyone I could find with my name linking to Alchemist Media and one exception, they have updated the links (Hi Matt) The 15 remaining links showing in OpenSiteExplorer.org with the anchor text of “Jonah Stein” still pointing to Alchemist Media are all obviously scraped copies of the SEOMoz Ranking Factors Version 2 that are not even in English. The only thing on these pages in English are the names of the SEOs who participated. The moral of this story is that even if you are a professional SEO, your name belongs to Google.

Update: Neither Yahoo or Bing rank Alchemist on page 1 or 2 for my name. On the other hand, neither of them have ItsTheROI in first place. Yahoo doesn’t even have me on page 1 or 2!

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Intent Focused SEM

SEO and Pay Per Click landing pages should almost always be designed with the same content and the same layout because search engines reward on-page and on-site factors by trying to emulate human users as they crawl the page and navigate the